5 Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|/docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]], [[2009|/docs/developer/gsoc2009/]], [[2010|/docs/developer/gsoc2010/]], [[2011|/docs/developer/gsoc2011/]], and [[2012|/docs/developer/gsoc2012/]], to get an overview about prior year's projects.

11 Note to prospective students: These project proposals are meant to be a first approximation; we're looking forward to your own suggestions (even for completely new directions) and will try to integrate your ideas to make the GSoC project more interesting to all parties. Even when a proposal is very specific about the goals that must be achieved and the path that should be taken, these are always negotiable. Keep in mind that we have tried to limit the proposals on this page to those that (based on our past experience) are appropriate for the GSoC program. This is by no means a comprehensive list, original ideas or proposals based on project ideas found on other pages are very welcome.

13 Note to everyone else: These proposals are by no means Summer of Code specific, anyone is welcome and encouraged to adopt any of these projects at any time (just please let us know, or make a note on this page).

17 * Prerequisites: knowledge that the student should have before starting the project. It may be possible to acquire the knowledge in the course of the project, but the estimated difficulty would increase substantially. On the bright side, you can expect to have a much deeper understanding of these fields (and gain some real-world experience) after you successfully complete the respective project.

18 * Difficulty: Estimated difficulty of the project, taking into account the complexity of the task and the time constraints of the GSoC program.

19 * Contact point: The person you should contact for any further information or clarifications. If the primary contact for a project does not respond in a reasonable amount of time (2-3 days), you should contact the appropriate DragonFly BSD mailing list, usually kernel@.

27 DragonFly's version of the pf firewall was brought in from OpenBSD 4.7. FreeBSD imported the pf from OpenBSD 4.8 and has significantly enhanced the SMP performance of the firewall. Port the FreeBSD version of pf.

100 The DragonFly jails were updated from FreeBSD-4.8 capability to FreeBSD 5.1 capability in 2005. They haven't been improved on since. This goal of this project is to make DragonFly jails to be functionally identical to FreeBSD 9.x jail functionality such that software designed to work using modern FreeBSD jail functions will work on DragonFly without modification.

120 * This is a huge project, the initial GSoC portion of this project should focus only on creating infrastructure and proving out that infrastructure. The initial work should attempt to not create or enforce any specific allocation _policies_ based on the available NUMA information, simply provide that information in an easy to access and use fashion and create the possibility at various levels of implementing a future allocation policy. This could be initially proven out with simple dummy policies.

132 Valgrind is a very useful tool on a system like DragonFly that's under heavy development. Since valgrind is very target specific, a student doing the port will have to get acquainted with many low level details of the system libraries and the user<->kernel interface (system calls, signal delivery, threading...). This is a project that should appeal to aspiring systems programmers. Ideally, we would want the port to be usable with vkernel processes, thus enabling complex checking of the core kernel code.

134 The goal of this project is to port valgrind to the DragonFlyBSD platform so that at least the memcheck tool runs sufficiently well to be useful. This is in itself a challenging task. If time remains, the student should try to get at least a trivial valgrind tool to work on a vkernel process.

189 * Implement some or all of these subsystems in their entirety, or as completely as possible in userland using a daemon, mmap and the DragonFly umtx_sleep(2)/umtx_wakeup(2) or other userland facilities.

190 * Any security or other major hurdles to this approach that would likely have to be implemented in-kernel should be noted in the students application.

191 * Test and benchmark the new facilities with heavy SysV consumers such as PostgreSQL

192 * Identify performance tradeoffs made in the userland implementation versus the existing kernel implementation. If time permits identify and apply solutions to these tradeoffs so that the userland implementation performs on par with or better than the kernel implementation.

216 * Since we now have dm (device mapper) in DragonFly, it would be nice to make better use of it. Currently we have a relatively small number of useful targets (crypt, linear and striped).

217 * Other targets should be implemented, in particular the mirror target would be of interest. Other ideas are welcome, too. Before applying for this please discuss the target of interest on the mailing list or with me directly.

218 * There is a start of a journalled mirror target, if you want to attack soft mirroring; the problem is a lot more difficult than it seems at first, so talking on the mailing list or on IRC would be definitely worthwhile!

229 * unionfs is a particularly useful pseudo-fs which allows to have an upper and a lower filesystem on a single mountpoint. The upper mountpoint is mostly transparent, so that the lower mountpoint is accessible.

230 * A typical use case is mounting a tmpfs filesystem as the upper and a read-only FS as the lower mp. This way files can be edited transparently even on a RO filesystem without actually modifying it.

231 * The current unionfs is completely broken as it relies on the whiteout VFS technique which is not supported by HAMMER. A new unionfs implementation should not rely on archaic methods such as whiteout.

242 * Our libdevattr has an API which is mostly compatible with Linux' libudev, but it is doubtful that any Linux application making use of libudev would run out of the box on DragonFly with libdevattr.

243 * The aim of this project is to identify the shortcomings of libdevattr and fix them so that some common libudev applications work with our libdevattr.

244 * This might involve some kernel hacking to improve our kern_udev and definitely includes some grunt work of "tagging" subsystems with the kern_udev API.

245 * Most of the work will be in userland, though, working on udevd and libdevattr.

286 Our event tracing system, ktr(4), records interesting events in per-cpu buffers that are printed out with ktrdump(8). Currently, ktrdump uses libkvm to access these buffers, which is suboptimal. One can allow a sufficiently-privileged userspace process to map those buffers read-only and access them directly. For bonus points, design an extensible, discoverable (think reflection) mechanism that provides fast access via shared memory to data structures that the kernel chooses to expose to userland.

298 nmalloc is our libc memory allocator it is a slab-like allocator; it recently had some work done to add per-thread caches, but there is much more work that could be done. A project on this might characterize fragmentation, try out a number of techniques to improve per-thread caching and reduce the number of total syscalls, and see if any are worth applying.

320 * currently allocations > either 4k or 8k are forced directly to mmap(); this means that idle memory from free slabs cannot be used to service those allocations and that we do no caching for allocations > than that size. this is almost certainly a mistake.

352 Adjust the DragonFly kernel to be multiboot (the specification) capable. In addition, add necessary code to grub2 to understand our disklabel64 and anything else we need to be able to use grub2 to multiboot DragonFly without any chainloading involved.

363 Extend/modify the dsched framework to take into account jails and etc. instead of always allocating a 'tdio'. This would allow different process groupings (such as all processes in a jail) to be scheduled together. A new jail-specific policy would have to be written to support this, or an existing policy modified.

379 The idea here is to support the execution of 32 bit DragonFly binaries in 64 bit DragonFly environments, something numerous other operating systems have done. Several things must be done to support this. First, the appropriate control bits must be set to execute in 32-bit compatibility mode while in usermode instead of 64-bit mode. Second, when a system call is made from 32-bit mode a translation layer is needed to translate the system call into the 64-bit requivalent within the kernel. Third, the signal handler and trampoline code needs to operate on the 32-bit signal frame. Fourth, the 32 and 64 bit ELF loaders both have to be in the kernel at the same time, which may require some messing around with procedure names and include files since originally the source was designed to be one or the other.

383 In 2012 a GSoC made reasonable progress on this project, a future GSoC student could pick up where he left off: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~ivan/dragonfly.git/shortlog/refs/heads/32bit_api_dirty_2

393 ##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence.

394 * Create a set of tools (even better if it can be used like a library) that modifies how the pkgsrc packages are installed, allowing for the ability to upgrade individual packages, without stopping applications that depend on said packages from working. One method of achieving this is detailed at http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/#packages but other methods may be possible. PC-BSD have written a tool called PBI Builder which modifies FreeBSD ports for their dependency independence PBI system, this could be used as a starting point for the DragonFly BSD tools. Any attempt at this should leave room in the implementation to potentially work with other build systems, such as dports.

405 This is a project for a student with something to prove, executing a binary touches a huge number of moving parts of a modern kernel. This project would entail adding or porting support for Mach-O binaries to the DragonFly BSD kernel. It would also involve adding an additional system call vector, like the Linux vector used for linux binary emulation. This is quite a large and complicated task and any proposal will be expected to be well-researched to reflect that. The ability to execute non-GUI binaries that make use of shared libraries should be the minimum to which such a project should aspire. OpenDarwin is available as a reference or to port relevant code from.

416 Upgrade/partially rewrite the installer to be much simpler to maintain. As part of reworking the installer, several functions scattered around in other base utils should be factored out into libraries that both the installer and the util it comes from can use, e.g.:

436 DragonFly is currently limited to 63 CPU cores. Servers with more core than that are becoming sort of available or even potentially affordable. Supporting a number of cores greater than 63 is the first step in really testing SMP.

455 * Implement one encryption method. Encryption meta-data space is available in the blockref, usually around 192 bits, which can be used to specify e.g. a public key, salt, IV, and/or encryption chaining through the filesystem topology. Actual physical blocks must be encrypted in-place (1:1).

468 * hammer2 implements a fully set-associative indirect block table with dynamic radix, which means that the entries in an indirect block table have a lot of flexibility, including the ability to have redundant entries representing the same block.

470 * Implement hammer2's copies feature which allows one to configure multiple volumes and to specify that more than one copy of the filesystem topology be maintained. This requires both a realtime piece to handle filesystem modifications in progress, and a batch piece to tie-up loose ends. for a GSOC the batch piece is the easiest to implement for writing purposes, with a realtime piece for reading (but not writing, which would be much more difficult). The batch piece would simply traverse the filesystem looking for missing copies and construct the missing copies in batch or semi-real-time.

486 * Separate out the test runner from the results collector/aggregator/controller so that you can run the test runner on a VM or vkernel, and collect the results on a different system. That way, if the system under test crashes, the tests can continue.

487 * Create necessary infrastructure, including provisioning, to be able to spin up VMs with DragonFly for testing, especially kernel testing. A first step would be to get this to work with spinning up vkernels.

488 * Add support for per-testcase manifests instead of having to put everything in the runlist

503 DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests.

504 [Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/) is virtual machine manager for FreeBSD similar to the Linux KVM. This would be a big step forward for DragonFlyBSD, as it would allow us to run DragonFly on native hardware in situations where also Linux (or other operating systems) is required. IMHO, this would also reduce/eleminate the need for Linux 64-bit compatibility.

556 [Rust](http://www.rust-lang.org) is a safetly-oriented language in the same leage as C++ but without many of it's short-comings. It doesn't depend on a GC and can be used for very low-level tasks as well as high-level code. It is heavily developed by the Mozilla foundation.

560 What can be accomplished with Rust in the kernel? What would be the advantages and what the disadvantages? For example how could the device hierarchy be represented in Rust? Implementing a simple device driver. How can existing APIs be represented in Rust using traits? How could C call Rust code?

578 * Perhaps look to see how Linux can boot in one second, better pci scan code?

579 * "Some kernel work made it possible to do asynchronous initialization of some subsystems. For example, the modified kernel starts the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) initialization, to handle storage, at the same time as the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI), in order to handle USB" - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/